Decentralized dispatching for blocking avoidance in automate material handling systems

Abstract

Advancements in communication and computing technologies have made promising the decentralized control of automated material handling systems (AMHS) to alleviate blocking and congestion of production flows and raise productivity in an automated large-scale factory. With the growing availability of edge computing and low-cost mobile communications, either among vehicles (V2V) or between vehicles and machines (V2M), decentralized vehicle control may exploit frequent and low latency exchanges of neighborhood information and local control computation to increase AMHS operation efficiency. In this study, a decentralized control algorithm design, BALI (blocking avoidance by exploiting location information) algorithm, exploits V2X exchanges of local information for transport job matching, blocking inference, and job exchange for vehicle dispatching in AMHS. Performance evaluation of the BALI algorithm by discrete-event simulation shows that the BALI algorithm can significantly reduce blocking and congestion in production flows as compared to commonly used Nearest Job First rule-based heuristics.